Developing own protocol inside an appserver

as far as I know in general is not a great idea trying to use ServerSocket inside an appserver: a general good reason to avoid server socket programming inside a Java EE implementation is that manually handling sockets - and thus threads, to exchange data with remote client - may interfere with the need to keep things under the strict control of various containers that constitute an appserver. Anyway, I'd like to try to develop a custom client-server protocol, without renouncing to all those good things that an appserver brings with itself (Datasources; EJBs; and so on). What would be a good starting point ?

Thanks for your reply. I'll have a look at SailFin; actually, however, I'm more interested to work on a simple remoting protocol different from 'classical' remoting (RMI or similar) or based upon http requests...

I’ve looked at a lot of different solutions, and in my humble opinion Aspose is the way to go. Here’s the link: http://aspose.com